


Parasiten

by Erika_K



Series: One-shot Collection [5]
Category: Magdalena Eriksson & Pernille Harder, Women's Soccer RPF
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:02:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24325468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erika_K/pseuds/Erika_K
Summary: "...could you write one when m and p are about to start a family?"Sure, I can!
Relationships: Magdalena Eriksson/Pernille Harder
Series: One-shot Collection [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1569001
Comments: 6
Kudos: 43





	Parasiten

**Author's Note:**

> It took a while, but here we go again! I hope you like it!  
> Enormous thanks to Cupidwriter for answering the more nuanced language questions that dictionaries can't help with!  
> As always I'd love to hear what you think! Please leave comments. The longer and the more detailed the better. You can also contact me on Tumblr (erika---k).

At some point it had started to dawn on her that Pernille had become more important to her than just a friend and teammate and just shortly after that, Magda had fallen for her completely. Even if she had tried to fight it, she wouldn’t have had a chance.

She had been deeply in love with her ever since and had always been sure that she would never love anyone else like that ever again.

Well, how wrong you could be!

Magda stood in front of the open fridge, the handle of the door in her hand and stared at the black and white blurry pictures on the small slip of paper that they had taken home from the doctor’s visit today and that was now stuck to the fridge door with a football shaped magnet. There was Pernille’s name and date of birth and some technical data from the settings of the sonogram in the upper right corner. And there was a scale sketched into the picture.

12 cm! Involuntarily Magda looked at her hand like she had already done certainly one hundred times since this afternoon. “It still fits into one hand!” the doctor had said.

God, how small it still was…!

The fridge started beeping, warning her that its door had been open too long. She hastily closed the door and looked over at Pernille sitting at the kitchen table.

“What was I supposed to get?”

“Milk... “ Pernille raised the empty carton from the table. “We finished the milk!”

“Yeah… right…”

Magda opened the fridge again, got a new milk carton and returned to the table.

Pernille smiled at her. “12 cm!” she said, well aware of what Magda had been distracted by.

Magda grinned back. Sometimes it was almost impossible to smile as much as she wanted to. “Yes…! If the whole kid is 12 cm, can you imagine how small those toes must be…?”

Yes, there were toes! Clearly recognizable! Ten of them! They had counted! And fingers and arms and legs and a face with a nose… It really looked like a baby already… Their baby…

The doctor had pointed out a lot more that could be recognised in the sonogram, if you knew what to look for. Magda and Pernille hadn’t seen half of it to be honest. But it was nice to hear that apparently there was a set of organs that all did what they were supposed to do.

While they were clearing the table, Magda moved closely behind Pernille. She put her arms around her, nestling against her back, putting her hands on her belly. If she wore loose sweaters you didn’t see it immediately yet but otherwise there certainly was a slight bulge already.

“How can 12 cm take up that much space already?” she asked teasingly, her lips at Pernille’s temple.

Pernille leaned back against her. “Didn’t you listen today? The infrastructure is growing as well and taking up space!”

Magda giggled. “Yes, I heard that. And apparently you're providing a fantastic infrastructure to grow in!”

Pernille turned around in her arms. She leaned her head against her shoulder. “Do you mind if I leave the table to you?” she asked.

Magda didn’t mind, so she cleaned up the kitchen, while Pernille collapsed on the sofa, as she did most evenings by now.

When Magda joined her, Pernille was still awake enough to raise her head so Magda could sit down for Pernille to place her head in her lap, before she dozed off again.

Pernille had sent the new pictures to all possibly interested parties already during their drive home this afternoon. Magda read through all the reactions she had gotten by now from enthusiastic future grandparents, aunts and friends, while her fingers absently stroked through Pernille’s hair.

They had been pretty sure that their relationship would lead to something lasting very early on already. Part of that was of course that they had known they would never want to be without the other again. But what had also made everything so easy from the very beginning, was the practical aspect that they had very similar ideas of what they wanted in their lives.

So also the general agreement that children would be part of their future at some point had been there for a very long time.

There had been no real moment when they had actually started planning. The general idea had just very slowly merged into actual considerations.

Negotiations of new contracts had been accompanied by thoughts, if it might be reasonable to check for options to take a break during their active career or if their time to have a family would be later in life anyway.

Holiday plans that involved long flights or car rides had jumped the queue because it seemed smart to tick them off as long as they had no potentially cranky fellow traveller in tow.

A lot of time away from home and fully occupied weekends had automatically put certain options further to the bottom of the list when they had thought about which occupations to pursue after their active years.

The decision which country they would move to had suddenly been touched by the question if within the duration of the next contract it would become relevant to have potential grandparents nearby.

Also how much friends who already had children cursed about the child care situation depending on which country they lived in, suddenly had become an interesting information.

And last but not least: Did they want to live somewhere where the possibility to have children as a same-sex couple was a well established part of the legislation and the public health service or didn’t they mind to have to deal with an at best abeyent legal sitation, costly private options and lengthy adoption procedures?

For quite some time those questions arose sometimes but were still just something that they would have to think about some day.

...until they had just occasionally taken up a phone instead and started Googling - regulations, costs, waiting times...

...until at some point the occasional Google searches had become earnest research instead. 

One evening, when they had been sitting on the sofa together, by now both of them eagerly bent over their iPads searching for information, they had looked up and smiled at each other: Yes, if the reflecting and planning had become this concrete… maybe it was time...

This was supposed to be normal, unproblematic, easy…

In some way it had felt like a betrayal to all the efforts generations before them had put into making same-sex parents an accepted normal to admitted that there were issues. They had reluctantly danced around it for some time before they finally had decided that this was ridiculous and that bringing things out into the open and resolving them was what they were good at and what had always worked for them .

So, yes, there obviously would be one of them who would be more involved in this than the other and they both wanted to be that one.

Maybe that was part of the progress… Maybe by now you could admit that you wondered if the one not experiencing pregnancy and birth might miss out on something and if it really wouldn’t feel any different to know that you didn’t share any genes with your child... Without anybody using those concerns to argue that same-sex couples having kids was a terrible idea to begin with...

It wasn’t a terrible idea, obviously! There were just some things that needed to be sorted out first.

Agewise, healthwise and jobwise they were both pretty much in the same situation, so there had been no objective factors here that would take the decision for them.

Pernille had grown up taking it for granted that if she would have kids she would obviously get pregnant.

Magda had already when she found out how babies were made had a certain hunch that if she ever wanted kids, there had to be other ways...

So the thought of taking the supporting role had seemed less far off for Magda and in the end she had agreed to walk around with the idea for a few days to see if she could get used to it.

As soon as she had earnestly tried to imagine what it might mean for her, she had realized just how much she actually started to look forward to seeing Pernille pregnant.

And if her genes didn’t get their chance it meant that Pernille’s would and the thought of having a little Pernille running around the house seemed at least as intriguing as a small version of herself.

Once the decision had been reached Magda had been confident that it would be ok for her. She had still expected that sometimes she would be jealous; that sometimes she would wonder if she missed out on a bond that Pernille automatically had, but that in general she would be ok with it.

What she hadn’t expected was how much she would actually enjoy the role she had ended up in now.

When things eventually had gotten down to business, the question of whether or not this would work out right at the first try had been much more important to her than the fact that at the crucial appointment her part in everything had come down to holding Pernille’s hand. 

Three weeks later she was jolted out of deep sleep by Pernille jumping on her, straddling her by the waist and holding a stick with two pink lines in her face. Ever since she had woken up sufficiently to actually process what Pernille was trying to tell her, she had just been so incredibly happy. 

It had still been so abstract, though.

She had known what those two lines meant obviously, but for quite some time that happiness had nevertheless still been solely focussing on Pernille. It had still just been Pernille and her, making plans, looking forward to something...

All the admiration and love she felt for her anyway had even further intensified now that Pernille was additionally the one who would make them a family. Which made it extra challenging when they both had to realise that how tough and physically strong you were in general wasn’t necessarily an indication of how well you would handle a pregnancy.

Of course they had been aware of what you might put yourself into when you got pregnant but Magda had not been fully prepared for this anyway.

She had soon stopped counting how often she had woken up to Pernille puking in the bathroom and how often she had come home to find Pernille sound asleep even in the early afternoon.

“You still remember that we agreed that you would have the next one, don’t you?” Pernille had gasped one morning, while Magda was crouching beside her holding her hair back.

Magda smiled. “Yes, I definitely do!”

Pernille sat back on the floor, leaning against the bathtub, closing her eyes. “Good! Don’t you forget that!”

Magda handed her a paper towel. “I won’t! Don’t worry!”

It was really awful to see her like that, but lucky enough, Pernille herself didn’t seem to mind all of this too much. She still seemed to cheerfully look forward to the things to come, even when she felt sick almost constantly and the only time she wasn’t tired was when she was actually sleeping.

Apparently that black and white blurry stain on the first sonogram picture - that considering all the energy it seemed to drain from Pernille soon got the honestly affectionate working title  _ Parasiten*  _ (*Swedish = the parasite) - was allowed to do this to her.

Magda couldn’t do much more than to make what felt like fifty mugs of camomile tea per day and hold her hand when she tried to fall asleep while everything seemed to spin around her because she felt so dizzy.

Yeah, holding Pernille’s hand was apparently her job in this now and just like she had approached every other task she had ever gotten in her life, she planned to excel at this one as well.

She had also eagerly engaged in that assignment at the next doctor’s visit, when the blurry stain had become something between a gummy bear and a large eyed extra-terrestrial. A spine, eyes, some fin-like things that would become arms and legs and... a heart.

That was clearly working.

You could see it beat in the sonogram.

You could even guess how those fins were paddling in the amniotic fluid.

Magda had sat on her chair holding Pernille’s hand and stared at the monitor. 

That had been the moment when the two stripes on a stick, some black and white stains on a piece of paper and Pernille's constant nausea and exhaustion had become more than a theoretical knowledge that they would be a family soon.

This wasn't just an addition to Pernille anymore. This was their baby and there was no question anymore: Yes, it actually was possible for her to love someone more than she loved Pernille. Sorry, Pernille, you’re second place now! 

Magda watched Pernille sleeping in her lap. She was very well aware that she had lost her top position in Pernille's ranking as well but they were both very happy to have their mutual new number one.

She stroked a strand of hair from Pernille's forehead. What would  _ Parasiten _ look like? 

She knew baby pictures of Pernille of course that provided a basis to imagine a face, bright blue eyes and a fuzz of light hair. 

She would love to have a little version of Pernille, definitely, but she wouldn’t really mind to find some unknown traits either. It was part of  _ Parasiten _ , part of their family that genetically there was someone else involved, so it was fully ok if it would be noticeable in some way.

Magda’s hand moved to Pernille’s belly. She loved the thought that their child was under her hand when she did this. It didn’t feel like she was just touching her, by now, favorite part of her wife anymore. This was  _ Parasiten _ she was caressing.

Pernille said she already felt a slight flutter sometimes, she wasn't sure but she believed it could be the kid.

Magda on the outside didn't feel anything yet of course. But she would soon and she was immensely looking forward to it.

Since the heart-beating sonogram she had even started to talk to  _ Parasiten _ in there. Even the most rational corner of her mind didn’t think this was ridiculous, because according to everything they had read by now  _ Parasiten _ could actually hear already and got used to voices it would recognize later on, so it certainly needed to know that she was out here waiting for it. 

Pernille loved to listen to those one-sided conversations that mostly were tender professions of love but sometimes also serious words about the fact that the first three months were over and according to everything you read it was supposed to not make Mor feel this bad anymore… so what the fuck was this still about!?

Which had led to their first disagreement about parenting... Seriously, it was ridiculous to try to keep swear words away from kids! If they didn't learn them at home, they learned them somewhere else! So, this kid would get to hear swear words! In three languages!

Or two at least... Danish would be Pernille’s department of course, so if she really wanted to risk that  _ Parasiten _ would get laughed at whenever they visited Denmark because it lacked a whole category of words in its vocabulary, that was her responsibility...

At the doctors appointment today the extra-terrestrial gummy bear from some weeks ago had become an actual baby and usually you were supposed to find out the gender of the baby at this sonogram appointment. But not with this kid, apparently. 

After some time the doctor had shaken her head and told them she would look at some other patients first, maybe it would have turned around by then.

“You can jump a little.” She had said before she left. “Sometimes that helps.”

Magda and Pernille had looked at each other after the door had closed.

“Was that a joke?” Pernille asked.

Magda shrugged her shoulders. “No idea…” But they decided that even if it had been a joke it couldn’t do any harm.

“I just hope this isn’t Hidden Camera…” Pernille said, while she was jumping up and down wondering if  _ Parasiten _ , well padded by amniotic fluid, would even notice any of this anyway.

Magda had looked up and scanned the ceiling for anything suspicious. The idea hadn’t seemed that far-fetched.

Also at the second try the doctor had just been able to shrug her shoulders. Not today… Next time maybe...

It really wasn’t that important but they had hoped that they would get a step closer to naming  _ Parasiten _ something more permanent.

They had both started to collect names they liked and it seemed pretty pointless to narrow it down if they still didn’t know if they were looking for a boys’ or a girls’ name.

They both knew that in the end they would take the name that was highest up on Pernille's list. But Magda threw in some ideas as a matter of form anyway.

Well, apparently  _ Parasiten _ was content with its name for now, if it had decided to let Mor and Mamma wait some more for that information.

Pernille blinked sleepily. “What are you grinning about?”

Magda smiled. “I’m just thinking that maybe we found out more about  _ Parasiten _ today than if we would have actually gotten to know if it's a son or a daughter. I’m telling you: It is very satisfied in there right now about the brilliant joke to just show us its bottom for 30 minutes! We can brace ourselves for a prankster…” 

Pernille groaned. “I highly doubt that our 12 cm long off-spring can do something like that on purpose already...”

“Yeah... But it would be great, wouldn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah, fantastic...” Pernille smiled at her. “If it turns out to be true, I’m totally blaming you for it! Or what do you think whose influence ideas like that could be attributed to...?!”

She blinked tiredly.

“Don’t you want to go to bed?” Magda asked and caressed Pernille’s cheek. “You’re going to fall asleep soon anyway and I really don’t want to have to wake you.”

“Yeah…” Pernille slowly sat up. “I would really have liked to spend the evening with you, but you’re probably right.”

“I’ll come with you. I wanted to finish my book anyway. It doesn’t matter where I read.” Magda got up and put her hand out to pull Pernille up.

She put an arm around Pernille’s shoulders while they were heading towards the stairs.

Halfway to the first floor Pernille stopped. “Do we have horseradish?” she asked.

“Horseradish? That white… sauce-stuff?”

Pernille nodded.

Magda shook her head. “I hardly think so.”

She looked at Pernille confusedly. She had eaten ready-made sandwiches with smoked salmon or roast beef that had horseradish paste on them. She had bought packages of smoked salmon that came with a small bag of horseradish... but otherwise…

“I don’t think I have ever consciously bought horseradish…”

“Me neither…” Pernille frowned thoughtfully. “But I think, now I want some…!”

There was a scarily determined emphasis on the word “now”, so fifteen minutes later Magda found herself at a night-open supermarket, browsing the shelves in the sauces and spices aisle for horseradish paste.

She had read up of course - Magda more than Pernille actually -, so she knew that these sudden weird cravings were supposed to reflect the needs of the growing baby at a given time. So it was advised to follow them.

What might it be that  _ Parasiten _ was growing right now that it was in need of some substance that was contained in horseradish of all things…?

Dairy products for calcium when the bones were growing… things like that Magda would have understood. But horseradish!? What the fuck? That was oddly specific...

Anyway, Pernille was growing a human inside herself! If Pernille sent her to get her some horseradish… Who was she to question this?

She found what she was looking for and also grasped some things for tomorrow's dinner, now that she was here anyway.

They had always liked fancy food, whether it was when they were going out to eat or cooking at home. They still did, even if Pernille recently got pretty pale at times when the seasoning got too extravagant, so Magda had cut it down a little in that department in recent months.

They had been warned by friends who already had kids that they were in for years of fast-cooked macaroni with ketchup and warmed-up frozen köttbullar with instant mashed potato. Magda’s declaration that her beneficial influence would certainly make their children develop a more advanced taste than that had just provoked sardonic laughter. Well, she’d at least try anyway...

She headed towards the check-out.

There were so many things she had never been aware of before that she suddenly noticed. Like that there were check-out lines that were marked candy-free. Was that really that crucial? Would it save her sanity on a stressful afternoon in a few years?

And the car parked beside hers... Were you really supposed to have a children’s seat in the front seat? And what kind of model was this anyway? Was there a point to these rear-facing ones?

She threw her groceries on the passenger seat and started the car.

There were little moments when she wasn’t sure if she was more scared or looking forward to all of this. But then again she looked at Pernille, Pernille’s belly and the sonogram pictures of  _ Parasiten _ in there and then she was sure that whatever scary things were coming along with this were totally worth it.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you liked the story! Please, please leave feedback!


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